Chapter 14
Him
Oscar and I hit a local motel just down the street from the bar where we’d had dinner, which was about forty-five minutes from Lincoln.
We’d both had a little too much beer to make it back to the other motel safely.
Eggy slept nestled on the pillow next to mine, and having him there helped buffer the empty ache I felt not having Abby beside me while I slept.
I woke around four a.m. and laid there for twenty minutes or so while Oscar snored loudly from the other side of the room.
I was reminded why I’d offered to pay for a separate room for him, but he’d protested more than he should’ve, claiming it was a waste of money.
He was fine sharing a space, and it hadn’t dawned on me until right about then that he’d done that not because he was frugal, but because he was worried. About me.
He never overtly showed it; he’d just appear on my doorstep back home, ready to head to the gym, or to bring over a to-go order from one of my favorite restaurants, or suddenly needing “another set of eyes” for a case he was working on.
The sneaky son of a bitch had appointed himself my personal suicide watch, which was touching if problematic. I’d need to figure out how to ditch him and make it clear that it wouldn’t be his fault if we didn’t find Abby alive.
With a sigh, I sat up, careful not to disturb Eggy, then got dressed in the dark. I grabbed the keys, my wallet, and my phone, and left the hotel in search of coffee.
There was a twenty-four-hour gas station about three miles from the hotel that I was guessing served the kind of black tar I was used to—LEOs notoriously make the shittiest coffee—and I was craving something that’d tar my tonsils.
Along the way, I called Abby’s cell, just to hear her voice.
“Hey, hey!” her voice sang. “It’s Abs. You can leave me a message, but my Spidey sense already knows why you’re calling, and you’ve been sent to voicemail for a reason.”
I chuckled, just like I always did whenever I gave in to the impulse to call her phone. “Smart-ass,” I muttered.
When the voicemail message said that her mailbox was full, I hung up and scrolled to my saved voicemails. I selected one from the previous August.
“Yo! Sexy beast! Where you at? I’m lonely and could use a climb up that rock wall. So, get your ass home, hubs!”
“Climbing the rock wall” was Abby’s term for gettin’ jiggy with it.
And goddamn, could we jiggy.
I’d never met a woman I was more attracted to.
Her body was perfection, even if she saw only the flaws.
Her face, her skin, her gorgeous long hair, that little divot above her top lip, and those fucking beautiful blue eyes.
The irises were the color and pattern of a swirling ocean.
I loved every part of her—even the crazy parts. Even the parts that drove me crazy.
The way she bounced her feet when she watched TV. And the way she always had to be right, even when she was wrong. Granted, that wasn’t often, but there were times…
And the way everything was so black-and-white for her. She struggled with the gray.
I shook my head, thinking of the other things that drove me nuts. “Nachos,” I muttered to myself. Jesus Christ did my wife love nachos. And Thai food. And Coney Island hot dogs.
And that was about it. My wife tolerated the food I prepared, but only because I’d agreed to supplement the weekly menu with three nights of takeout.
Tuesday was nacho night. Thursday was her red-curry favorite Thai dish or pad Thai noodles, and Saturday lunch was a Coney Island dog with plenty of mustard and a side of chili-cheese fries.
I did my best to get the occasional vegetable into her, but she didn’t make it easy.
A couple of years ago, when her insistence on eating the same shit again and again was starting to cause trouble between us—in a marriage, it’s always the little things—Candice had very quietly pulled me aside and told me that she was sending me a video and I needed to watch it.
Candice is someone you listen to no matter what she’s asking, so I watched the video, which was titled, “Ten signs she might be a high-masking autistic.”
That video was a fucking godsend. It explained Edgar to a T.
Since then, I’d done my homework, researching the characteristics of women with late-diagnosed autism, because they tend to present much differently than men and even younger women or girls,
and I’d realized that every single thing that sometimes frustrated me about Abby was something she couldn’t control.
Her epic meltdowns. The burnout. The rigid schedule.
The hard time she had looking people in the eye when speaking to them.
The way she struggled with large crowds, loud music, and too many stimuli hitting her all at once.
Or the way she would renumerate on the same thoughts again and again and again—most especially when they were negative.
And the way she felt responsible for getting even the smallest detail right and would rarely let herself off the hook if she got even the subtlest nuance wrong.
Once I understood that what made Abby special came with a whole shit-ton of quirks, I stopped trying to get her to relax, blow it off, let it go. She wasn’t capable of letting stuff go. She really struggled to relax. And she’d never, ever be able to simply blow it off.
The more I researched, the more I realized that that autism brain of hers didn’t need to be fixed because it wasn’t broken.
It was perfect in its own way, and very little of her quirky habits bothered me now.
The feet bouncing thing was about the worst of it.
Which was why we had fidget toys all over the house.
There was even one in my suitcase, ready for her to fiddle with the second we found her.
Maybe it was as much wishful thinking as bringing her dying dog across the country so that she’d get a chance to hug him before the end, but I couldn’t accept that Abby was gone. Not until I had solid proof one way or the other.
In my gut, I simply believed she was still alive. I didn’t have any idea what condition she was in or what condition she was being kept in, but I couldn’t let go of the hope that I’d find her and get her through whatever trauma she’d experienced.
Knowing her past made the thought of what she might be going through now really hard, though.
Her parents had abused the hell out of her when she was a kid, and it wasn’t until I put together the autism thing that I understood why they’d been so much worse to her than they’d been to her sister.
Kids—especially girls—with autism struggle socially until they learn to mask their impulses, and no doubt Abby’s shitbag malignant narcissist of a mother found her younger daughter “difficult.”
I’d never met Clair, which was by choice. Abby hadn’t had anything to do with her for well over twenty years, and she’d asked me once if I wanted to meet her parents. I’d told her no, but I’d never told her why.
I couldn’t meet those two assholes because I couldn’t trust myself not to slap the life out of them.
Edgar had told me stories about being thrown down a flight of stairs by her mom when she was four, beaten with a breadboard when she was seven—and when the breadboard broke, her mom had beaten her with another one, blaming her for breaking the first one.
My wife had been kicked, punched, beaten, berated, abused, ignored, and discarded all before she’d turned eighteen, and no one, literally no one in her extended family had ever come to her rescue, even though she had three aunts and four uncles.
They’d all known what monsters Mr. and Mrs. Cooper were, but nobody had said or done a goddamn thing to intervene in the abuse Abby had taken as a kid.
It was a fucking miracle she’d survived.
I’d even struggled to be okay with Cat—Abby’s sister—after hearing about all the bullshit that went down, and it’d been Cat who’d told me the whole disgusting story about what Abby had gone through.
In fact, Abs refused to talk about her childhood, and it just gutted me that she was ashamed of how she’d been treated by her parents, and not because she was ashamed of them.
She was ashamed because there was a part of her that believed the abuse was somehow her fault.
If she’d just been normal like her sister, then she would’ve come out of her childhood with two parents who loved her and were proud of her.
I mean, Jesus, right?
So, when Abby had asked me if I wanted to meet her parents, I’d had a moment of clarity, and I knew I couldn’t even be in the same room with those monsters without throwing some furniture. No way would I have come away from that meeting and not gotten arrested.
Thinking about that made me sigh heavily while I pulled into the gas station. I then parked next to a pump and cut the engine, running a hand down my face. I hadn’t thought of Sam and Clair—Abby’s parents—in years.
As I sat there, I realized why.
If you didn’t understand Abby’s autism, then you’d struggle with her personality.
She wasn’t meek, timid, or easily intimidated.
She was a strong, vocal, fiercely independent woman, with an unwavering sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, justice and injustice.
The motherfucker who’d abducted her would’ve figured out that she wasn’t going to be broken easily, if at all.
And what they’d been doing to her all this time could only be bad.
Like really fucking bad.
I gripped the steering wheel and laid my head against it, struggling with my emotions, and for a long time, I just focused on some deep-breathing exercises.
A knock at the window jolted me upright.
“You can’t sleep here!” said a tall, skinny guy in a loose-fitting hoodie with the gas station’s logo on it.
I held up my hand to acknowledge him and get him to back off, which he did, and then I opened the cab door and got out.
“You can’t sleep here,” he repeated, this time nervously while he looked me up and down.
I’m an inch or two over six-feet and one-eighty.
He came close to me in height but not in physique—even with my recent weight loss—so I could see why I made him nervous.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” I said. He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off.
“I hear ya, buddy. Just gonna gas her up, grab some coffee, and go, okay?”